I finally got around to changing my system to a UTF-8 system the other day. It was surprisingly easy, but with a few caveats to not annoy people on Latin-1 IRC channels and such.
Pterm supports UTF8 just fine, but is evidently not smart enough to actually pick a unicode font, so I had to tell it explicitly to use one.
Irssi in stable, testing, unstable, warty and hoary are all too old to have proper recode support, so I packaged irssi 0.8.10rc5 and uploaded that to breezy. This has nice recode support so you can say “please use latin1 while talking to this person”. I’ll have to fix that on vawad too when I get home.
Apart from that, it meant adjusting a set of dotfiles to not set LANG if
it is already set, changing the default in the gdm login screen and fix
up the ssh config on vawad to actually allow passthrough of LANG and
LC_* environment variables.
I need to adjust my emacs setup too, but that’s not too urgent and it is fairly simple to do.